That was an enjoyable read.
I vaguely remembered seeing this title before, and a search turned up two fanfics with this title, but they’re both pretty short so once this has multiple parts this one should be unambiguously the “main” one. (The more popular one has “Chamber of Innocence” instead, which is different enough to not cause confusion.)
There’s elements of both for me. The central thesis or idea always develops from (mostly) nonverbal thinking, but writing helps me define its boundaries and connect it to other mental models I have.
One thing I’ve learnt regarding that is that, if while writing it seems like my central idea itself needs changing, it’s more likely that I’ve just gotten lost in the weeds and need to expand my view, than that the idea itself is wrong. It’s tempting to “change your mind” in the middle of writing, to feel like you’re growing and learning, and but (at least for me) that’s often a result of availability bias and isolated demands of rigor on myself.
If it hurts, you’re probably doing it wrong.
You’re not trying your best if you’re not happy.
I believed this firmly for most of my life, and still think there’s some value in it, but I’ve learnt that this is a pretty privileged take on things. Targeted at a LW audience, it’s probably true and useful to a majority, but that’s because most of us (I believe) are living better lives than at least 80% of humanity, and thus fall into the truthish region of these ideas.
Most of humanity lives in uncertainty, instability, and the myriad day-to-day pains that are ultimately rooted in those. Most people don’t have the privilege of sorting through multiple sources or spending time gaining enough background knowledge, such that learning something becomes the joy it should be.
When your very survival, barely holding together a family and a home, takes up 15 hours of your day, it’s going to hurt if you’re trying to advance yourself with education or other self-improvement, it’s going to take a necessary toll on your physical and mental health. The reason “pain is the unit of effort” is such a common idea is that it was true for the majority and still is (if to a slightly lesser extent than back then, because of slowly declining poverty rates). For people in bad life situations, almost any extra effort is pain, so if you’re supposed to be working and are not experiencing pain, it’s a good heuristic that you’re most likely avoiding actual work by some means, because that’s such a tempting prospect, rather than that you’ve somehow cleverly worked around the pain.
The post is (likely) a good lens to evaluate your own life, and especially to leave behind baggage from previous less-privileged generations that might not apply any more, but make sure not to misapply it as a lens to view the rest of the world, to whom it likely doesn’t apply and may even be counterproductive.
I was subscribed to the RSS feed of all posts, but that was a bit overwhelming; so I’m now subscribed to the feed of “posts with 30 or more karma” that they provide, but I’m now finding that LW is much less interesting or useful to me—which I could have predicted, given that I’d already noticed that the karma of a post often turned out a bad indicator of how useful/interesting it would be to me. The posts I found to be the best were most often in the 5-15 karma range—but alas, there’s no feed for that.
Now I’m thinking about just unsubscribing from the RSS feed and setting LW as my homepage.
Good to see a detailed examination of reinfections though—that’s the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to see.
User Annapurna posted a webpage that tracks Covid-19 reinfections, in case you hadn’t seen it.
humans are evolutionarily biased towards paying extra attention to things like spiders and snakes
Only tangentially related, but since the article seems to be treating the fear of snakes and that of spiders equivalently, I looked into something I’d been curious about: how widespread this supposed fear of spiders actually is. It’s a common meme on the Internet that everyone is afraid of spiders, but here in India they’re generally regarded as curious creatures and minor pests, not even as “scary” as cockroaches, and not at all comparable to snakes.
I looked at the Wikipedia page on cultural depictions of spiders, which said this:
The spider gained an evil reputation from the 1842 Biedermeier novella by Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider. In this allegorical tale which was adapted to various media, the spider symbolizes evil works and represents the moral consequences of making a pact with the devil.
and started forming a story in my head that it’s a Western cultural thing started by this one book and proliferated into multiple media from there.
But then I came across this paper “A cross-cultural study of animal fears”, which seems to be suggesting (Table 2) that India is the outlier here—Indians were “significantly less fearful than” every other country when it comes to spiders. And there’s not a general East-West trend either, Holland is less fearful than Hong Kong, and Japanese are the most fearful of spiders among all tested countries. In general,
Indian subjects reported lower levels of fear to disgust-relevant animals [cockroach, spider, beetle, maggot, worm, leech, bat, wasp, lizard, rat, slug, bee, jellyfish, moth, and snail] than subjects from all other countries, while Japanese subjects reported significantly higher fear ratings to disgust animals than Indian, UK, USA, Korean and Hong Kong subjects.
I wonder if this reduced fear also translates as a corresponding lack of extra attention, or if the attention is still there, just not associated with the fear response.
Rituals often use lots of candles.
This sentence clashed with my world model so hard I had to stop here and think. Not only because I didn’t have this association between rituals and candles from my own culture, but also that I didn’t know candles were so frequent in rituals elsewhere. Rituals here in India also frequently involve flame, but almost always in the form of clay or brass lamps. Candles are more of a functional, utilitarian thing, and I’d subconsciously assumed that was the case worldwide (except a few occasional events like Hanukkah).
In my mind, candles are associated with being poor—having power cuts, not being able to afford emergency backup lights, and so having to endure the slight smoke and poor light of a candle. I’d seen the Twitter conversation above previously, and imagined someone buying $3600 worth of plain white 1¢ candles—I saw it as just weird millenial humour, never did it cross my mind that someone might actually buy expensive candles and spend comparable amounts.
I don’t know if I have a point, except to say it’s weird to be part of a group that generally has similar interests, and then suddenly get reminded of jarring IRL differences in our lives that this medium can’t—usually—convey.
I think ‘Improving the Incentives’ misses the point of Petrov day. The point of Stanislav Petrov is that he made his decision despite all his personal incentives being aligned the opposite way. It was a very hard thing to do, and creating incentives to not press the button cheapens the decision and takes away the difficulty of the decision—especially when in this circumstance the incentive to press the button is already a weak one (basically just “for the lulz” as far as I can tell), much weaker than the potential dangers to his career and his country that he had to deal with.
I see this Petrov day event as a chance to think about the difficulty of getting multiple people to do the “right thing” despite having little incentive to do so, about creating an environment that nurtures and nourishes such independent decision-making, and about the fragile balance of trust. Creating explicit incentives breaks away from this difficult problem and turns it into a different, often easier one.
Shouldn’t be any confusion.
Famous last words.
(I don’t think it matters enough to avoid that name, but there will certainly be small confusions, by search engines and by people familiar with that Twiki and getting into LessWrong as newcomers. I can’t imagine that leading to any particular negative consequence other than some little wasted time and brainpower for those, though.)
The first paragraph reminded me of the Correspondence principle, which seems close to what you’re looking for (if I’m understanding correctly). The Wikipedia article has an “Other scientific theories” section, indicating it does get used more generally than the quantum->classical correspondence Bohr had in mind (although that section doesn’t have any citations unfortunately). Perhaps it’s worth labeling it “General Correspondence principle” or “Generalized Correspondence principle” in practice, when using it outside of physics.
Shibas do not bark very much, instead preferring to emit terrible, nearly goat-like noise called a “shiba scream,” which has been described as “bloodcurdling” and like the “screams of the damned.”
Huh, I did not know this was a common Shiba thing. I got recommended a fun little dog channel called ‘The Adventures of Mandy and Major’ recently where I came across the “shiba scream”, but at the time I thought it was just a weirdly pitched howl-attempt by Major. I wouldn’t have thought it a breed trait (and in my rating, that would mostly be a negative). Shibas have always been at the top for me in terms of looks though, one of the most beautiful dog breeds in the world.
Rating: ★★★ (Good)
Btw, can you somehow indicate that the rating is out of three stars, in these posts? I was wondering whether this was out of four stars or five, until I went back to the original post to check.
The GURPSFriendlyAI page linked from the message, on the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20140907002238/http://sl4.org/wiki/GurpsFriendlyAI
The AI Critical Failure Table linked from there (renumbered and slightly expanded from the version in the message): http://web.archive.org/web/20130828205405/http://sl4.org/wiki/FriendlyAICriticalFailureTable
Scott Adams convinced me of this idea with his writing about us being “moist robots”. It simplifies a lot of things in day to day life, by the understanding it gives you of both yourself and others.
very short list of authors who’d made it onto my trust list
A pretty late question, but would you mind sharing(/linking to a previously shared copy of) this list?
Was this post recently updated or something, or are the comment timestamps all wrong? The post says it was posted on “5th Feb 2020” (and it appeared on my RSS feed around that time), but many of the comments are from 2016.
Since nobody else seems to have mentioned it: Code Complete is probably part of the answer you’re looking for, even if it’s several years old by this point—the concepts you’re looking to learn aren’t as fleeting as the technical details that change all the time. (Although, I don’t remember if even the latest edition tackles Agile methodology, so you might need a separate resource for that if it doesn’t.)
the distance between a point p and a set of points S is defined as inf{d(p,q)|q∈S}
Is this supposed to be min instead of inf (or am I misunderstanding the notation)?
India will cease to be a secular state
Do you mean formally (as in changing the wording in constitution, etc.), or by some particular pragmatic measure? I can understand where it’s coming from and vaguely even agree, but I’m curious if you have any measurable indicators for this in mind.
and communal violence will become more common.
Care to put any numbers on this, for eg. number of communal incidents in a year or whatever similar measure is available?
What’s a significant difference between this and a library?